This is my kind of diet craze.

Regardless of your feelings on self experimentation, this is easy and doesn't sound like it will hurt you. Though having read this, I'm wondering if part of the reason I had been losing weight lately are the huge number of vitamins, including some omega-3 oil pills that I have been taking. There is a short piece on this in the NYT, but the entire fascinating, but very (77 pages) long, scientific paper is online in PDF form and I cannot stress how much you should read it. There are many parts you can skim through, but his survey of studies that have been done on food and weight loss is positively enlightening. However, if you just want the quick perscription, here is the relevant quote:

1. Eat new foods. No food with a new flavor is fattening, the theory implies.
2. Vary the flavor of foods eaten repeatedly. If products came with optional flavoring packets and consumers added varying amounts of the flavorings, this would produce variation in flavor.
3. Consume calories with no flavor associations. Ingestion of calories with no flavor should lower the set point, the theory implies. The fructose-water results suggest that ingestion of a small fraction of one’s daily calorie intake this way may substantially reduce the set point. Flavorless vegetable oils (vegetable oils, such as olive oil, from which all flavor molecules have been removed) are a possible source of calories without taste.